Best known in her own time as a novelist and essayist, Mary Coleridge is remembered in ours primarily as a poet. Her poems, though they received little public notice during her lifetime, were praised by such respected writers as Robert Bridges, Laurence Binyon, and Walter de la Mare. The popularity her poetry enjoyed in the years following her death has not endured, but her poems continue to be studied and read.

Mary Coleridge was born into a family that provided a seemingly ideal background for a child of artistic bent. Her great-grandfather, James Coleridge, was the older brother of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her father, Arthur Duke Coleridge, was a lawyer by profession but a singer by inclination. A steadfast member of the Church of England and an avid reader of sermons, he chose not to pursue an operatic career in order to avoid the moral irregularities of theatrical...